To Live Is to Die, To Die Is to Live is a relentlessly brutal, monumentally pissed-off beast of a record. It’s heavy, venomous, and uncompromising. But what surprised me about it, and what keeps me coming back and listening to it time and again, is the surprising amount of diversity and creativity on display here. Hailing

On “Devouring Mortality”, the California death metal crew’s third full-length album, Skeletal Remains deliver what is without a doubt one of the best death metal albums of the year so far. This is a record deeply indebted to the old ways of death metal, drawing inspiration from early Morbid Angel, Pestilence, Death and Obituary, with

We return for part two of our review of Oration MMXVIII which took place on the evening of March 8. As with the first day, this took place in the humble bar Húrra, located in downtown Reykjavík, a dark, intimate venue with a great sound system. Where the first day leaned heavily towards black metal,

The third and final edition of Oration has drawn to a close. No other festival I’ve ever attended has come close to achieving what Oration has over the past few years. The links between the festival itself and the rising tide of Icelandic black metal run deep: the festival is organised by Stephen Lockhart, who

Watain are a band that divide opinion within the metal community, but they’ve never struck me as a band that has any interest in pandering to one group or another for commercial gain; rather, they’re a band that make unapologetic and uncompromising extreme music with total dedication to their craft. And for all of its

2017 was a surprising year for me, at least on a musical level. I went into the year with really high expectations for a whole range of albums I knew were on their way, but actually very few of them really connected with me in the way I hoped they would; they were often good,

Altarage hail from the Spanish city of Bilbao in northern Basque Country. Their identities buried beneath black veils, Altarage are a band whose music stands and falls on its own merits. Their murky, disorienting species of blackened death metal is dragged straight from the depths of Lovecraftian horror, as chilling howls cry out from the

Finland has always pioneered various forms of disturbing, unsettling death metal. Demilich, Demigod, Convulse, and Adramalech have gone on to inspire waves of death/black metal bands far beyond Finland’s borders. Desolate Shrine is very much a different kind of beast, equal parts black metal and death metal, with the crushing weight of doom metal and disturbing

I’ve always believed that Myrkur had it in her to release a truly great album. Amalie Bruun strikes me as a woman invested in the music she creates, who loves what she does, and has been steadily but surely improving and refining her music since her debut EP in 2014. I still think that her

There are perhaps few genres more niche than dungeon synth. This strange love-child of black metal and dark ambient music was birthed in the early 90s, often tracing its roots back to albums by Burzum, Mortiis and Summoning. On an aesthetic level, dungeon synth is deeply indebted to the black metal scene of which its